seem
to be looking on.

Jondrette had again begun to speak in a plaintive tone, with so vague
an eye, and so lamentable an intonation, that M. Leblanc might have
supposed that what he had before him was a man who had simply gone mad
with misery.

"If you do not buy my picture, my dear benefactor," said Jondrette, "I
shall be left without resources; there will be nothing left for me but
to throw myself into the river. When I think that I wanted to have my
two girls taught the middle-class paper-box trade, the making of boxes
for New Year's gifts! Well! A table with a board at the end to keep the
glasses from falling off is required, then a special stove is needed, a
pot with three compartments for the different degrees of strength of
the paste, according as it is to be used for wood, paper, or stuff, a
paring-knife to cut the cardboard, a mould to adjust it, a hammer to
nail the steels, pincers, how the devil do I know what all? And all that
in order to earn four sous a day! And you have to work fourteen hours a
day! And each box passes through the workwoman's hands thirteen times!
And you can't wet the paper! And you mustn't spot anything! And you must
keep the paste hot. The devil, I tell you! Four sous a day! How do you
suppose a man is to live?"

As he spoke, Jondrette did not look at M. Leblanc, who was observing
him. M. Leblanc's eye was fixed on Jondrette, and Jondrette's eye was
fixed on the door. Marius' eager attention was transferred from one
to the other. M. Leblanc seemed to be asking himself: "Is this man an
idiot?" Jondrette repeated two or three distinct times, with all manner
of varying inflections of the whining and supplicating order: "There
is nothing left for me but to throw myself into the river! I went down
three steps at the side of the bridge of Austerlitz the other day for
that purpose."

All at once his dull eyes lighted up with a hideous flash; the little
man drew himself up and became terrible, took a step toward M. Leblanc
and cried in a voice of thunder: "That has nothing to do with the
question! Do you know me?"

CHAPTER XX--THE TRAP

The door of the garret had just opened abruptly, and allowed a view of
three men clad in blue linen blouses, and masked with masks of black
paper. The first was thin, and had a long, iron-tipped cudgel; the
second, who was a sort of colossus, carried, by the middle of the
handle, with the blade downward, a butcher's pole-axe for slaughtering
ca